This invention relates to electronic display of ink for hand entered characters for a handheld computing device.
Conventional hand held computing devices, such as personal digital assistants (xe2x80x9cPDAsxe2x80x9d), handheld wireless devices and radiotelephone devices referred to as xe2x80x9csmart phonesxe2x80x9d (collectively referred to herein as xe2x80x9chand held devicesxe2x80x9d) provide a touch-sensitive screen (xe2x80x9ctouch screenxe2x80x9d) overlaid on a liquid crystal display (xe2x80x9cLCDxe2x80x9d) screen, collectively referred to herein as a display module. Many of the hand held devices provide built-in handwriting recognition or character recognition technology as a user input tool for text editing. This tool is used to recognize handwritten characters entered on a touch screen with a stylus, where each character is displayed on the LCD screen when the character is recognized.
Some of the hand held devices that incorporate handwriting recognition capability display xe2x80x9cinkxe2x80x9d for a handwritten character on the LCD screen as the character is being written on the touch screen. On such devices, a physically dedicated region (xe2x80x9cwrite padxe2x80x9d) within the display module is allocated for user handwriting input and its ink display or viewing, where it is appropriate. Conventional display of ink over standard text makes the ink difficult to distinguish from the standard text, where ink and text have substantially the same font color, usually black for a monochrome LCD. Some devices use thicker ink lines for better display, but this approach is still inadequate to provide a clear distinction between standard text and ink. Use of thicker ink makes it more difficult for a user to identify unacceptable quality in a handwritten character input when character size is small. Lack of distinction between standard text and ink makes it difficult to distinguish between errors arising from user input (e.g., poor handwriting) and errors arising from performance of the handwriting recognition software.
What is needed is an approach that makes the ink more distinguishable from the standard text for a selected time interval after a handwritten/cursive or hand printed (xe2x80x9chand enteredxe2x80x9d) character is entered. Preferably, the relevant characteristics (color, shade, thickness, font, etc., referred to as a xe2x80x9cdisplay patternxe2x80x9d) of the standard text and/or the ink should be selectable and should be changeable depending upon the user""s preference.
These needs are met by the invention, which in one embodiment changes the display pattern of the standard text, or provides a xe2x80x9cgrayed out display,xe2x80x9d as soon as a hand entered alphanumeric character is accepted and ink representing the hand entered character is displayed in a designated region of the screen, referred to herein as a xe2x80x9csoft write pad,xe2x80x9d where standard text characters and handwritten characters (i.e., ink) are both displayed. The soft write pad may be the entire screen or may be a designated sub-region within the entire screen. When the ink is not present, the standard text on the soft write pad is displayed in a conventional display pattern that is presented when no hand entered character is present. When the presence of one or more standard text characters is detected on the soft write pad and ink corresponding to a hand written character begins to be displayed, the conventional display pattern of the standard text and/or the display pattern of the hand entered character ink is changed so that the ink becomes distinguishable. When the ink is removed from the soft write pad, the displayed standard text reverts to the conventional display pattern.
Optionally, where the LCD screen displays two or more colors, the standard text and the ink are displayed on the soft write pad in colors that are distinguishable from each other. Optionally, the standard text color and/or the ink color are user-controlled, to allow compensation for any difficulty a user may have in distinguishing between two or more specified colors (e.g., where a user experiences color blindness). Optionally, the standard text is removed from, or substantially grayed out on, the soft write pad whenever ink is displayed. Optionally, the time during which the ink is displayed on the soft write pad, after removal of stylus pressure, is user-controlled or is automatically set.